Game details

At release, Total War: Warhammer seriously benefitted from untying the strategy series from its historical roots. The wildly varied Warhammer fantasy universe allowed each of the game's factions to be unique—not just in terms of starting map location and slight differences to cavalry charge speed but also through wholly different mechanics and campaigns. That variation only grew (and grew more expensive) over time with a glut of DLC.

The factions of Total War: Warhammer 2 aren't quite so diverse. Moment-to-moment abilities and attributes set them apart, but an identical overarching objective ties them back together in largely identical quests to fill in progress bars. Said bars represent resources players accrue, earn, or otherwise cut out of their opponents. The goal is to be the first to fill up the bar and survive subsequent, ever-more-difficult waves of Chaos that appear at specific intervals.

It all just doesn't feel very "Warhammer-y," aside from the encroaching Chaos armies. The universal "now you win" bar is awfully sterile, and the abstract objective is a bean counter's job, not something for the titanic, improbable clash of gods and nature that is Warhammer. Granted, like the rest of the Total War franchise, half of the game is still a large-scale turn-based strategy game, with the other half being colossal, real-time strategy battles you can choose to skip. So a certain amount of bean counting has always been part of the process.

Like the first Total War: Warhammer in particular, though, the economic and political sim elements are much reduced compared to something like Rome II, Empire, or Shogun. On the overworld map, the moves you make with Lizardmen, high and dark elves, or the rat-like Skaven are mostly limited to where you put your armies, whether to have them destroy or occupy settlements, and what new weapons of war to research.

Hydras, ogres, and rats, oh my!

That means the focus is back on the massive real-time battles, a hallmark of developer Creative Assembly's series where the otherworldly elements of Warhammer are still in full force. Dinosaur people riding garden-variety dinosaurs rush headlong into Rat Ogres (which is like a regular ogre, but made of rat). "War Hydras" just flat-out eat men, elves, and anything else made of meat by the droves. It's the most absurd of absurdist fantasy. Which is to say it's Warhammer. Which is to say it's wonderfully silly, but somehow not too silly to care about.

And I have come to care a great deal about my Lizardmen faction leader, Mazdamundi. The floating psychic toad the size of a post office has seen me through countless battles and occupations. Total War: Warhammer 2 rewarded this with skill points to make the general a consummate administrator, radical mage, and inspiring presence for his troops.

Commanding battles personally is half the fun, but the load times are terrible.

Every species has unique strengths and weaknesses—although some are awfully esoteric.

Massive battles are a hallmark of Creative Assembly's series.

Real-time combat is heavily dependent on formation and positioning.

Evil magic elves really hate rat people, because this is Warhammer.

The Skaven are probably the most interesting new faction in the bunch.

Terrain is also a powerful tool in Warhammer's real-time battles.

The High Elves have a nice view, but they're easily the most "standard" faction.

Piddly ground troops usually aren't much of a match for monsters.

It's hard not to care about a certain set of troops once they've seen battle a few times.

Every faction has its own reason for fighting, but they all boil down to collecting the same re-skinned resources.

Every army in the game requires a Lord like Mazdamundi to lead it into battle, which subsequently gives all the battalions their own identity as they level up alongside their commander. Coming on top of the absurd units the game has to drive its war machines, there’s a whole mess of personality in each fighting force. That lends a certain weight to committing those forces to battle that you simply never had in other Total War games, where mostly faceless homunculi of history duke it out.

My investment in each of my armies was reinforced by the very limited number I could field at one time. Like its predecessor, Total War: Warhammer 2 is rather economically restrictive. You can sport two or three reasonably sized regiments before their turn-by-turn upkeep cost chokes the life out of your finances.

New World real estate management

The only downside to these skirmishes is the offensively long load times in between them, which ran several minutes a pop on my system. If you're not running the game off of an SSD, you might just find the wait times so annoying that you want to use the "auto-resolve" option for the battles. In that case, the stakes of battle are out of your hands, and the narrative you build up around your forces over time is gone.

It's often better, then, to rely on the free (or, sometimes, income-generating) "garrisons" that come with certain structures you build on settlements. They kill two birds with one catapult: defending cities without the need for expensive Lord-driven militaries and identity-free bodies to throw at attackers with auto-resolve, thereby cutting down on instances of loading.

Garrisons are essential for one other reason: every city and village generates a steady stream of those precious bar-filling resources, so commanding territory is a must. This plays right into the hands of my favored faction, the Lizardmen. While each faction's overarching goal is identical, they still have certain traits that set them apart. The cold-blooded, Aztec-influenced creatures, for instance, earn powerful bonuses for holding every settlement in a province.

It makes sense. The Lizardmen are masters of the "New World" continent where Total War: Warhammer 2 takes place. They start the campaign with much of their territory claimed by elf and human conquistadors. Taking back their home strengthens them—even as it gets harder to control vast tracts of land with less than a handful of standing armies.

Playing the Lizardmen was like playing a very bad, very forceful fantasy landlord. I'd claim a useful zone, build up my free garrison, and return my real combatants to the warmer climes of my capital. The new tenants could deal with any problems that cropped up (including literal rats, come to think of it). I had more important places to lay down my turtleish defenses.

Rats beat pirates

By contrast, the Dark Elves are pirates and slavers. They summon floating city-ships called Black Arks to command the seas, capture slaves to generate income, and sacrifice them instead of all-important gold to perform campaign-shifting spells. High Elves, meanwhile, are your bog-standard soldiers and sorcerers, which end up feeling a bit boring in a world where you control gods and horrors. They do have a race-specific system for political intrigue, but it's subtle and esoteric in a world that clubs subtlety over the head and throws it in the river. Like the all-encompassing progress bar itself, Elvish politics feel out of place in Warhammer.

The Skaven, Warhammer's fan-favorite faction of rat people, are the real standouts, though. They're like a mishmash of races from the previous game, tugged lightly in all manner of strategic directions. The remaining factions only need to manage one or two extra battle conditions, which let me relax more than was always satisfyingly challenging.

Turn after turn, the Skaven corrupt whatever land they control with their very presence. Said infection breeds rebellion. Rebellion spawns hostile NPC armies. Hostile NPC armies must, of course, be put down before they can attack. But since these revolts are relatively weak and spread out over time—not to mention that higher levels of corruption let Skaven spawn free units during battle—they're actually a decent means for the Skaven to grind up XP and food.

Food is a resource specific to the Skaven. If they have it, the hungry little buggers stay strong. If they don't, they grow weak. So constantly raiding the more civilized races of Total War: Warhammer 2 (or your own dissidents) isn't just useful but necessary to remain a threat. That is the kind of faction-specific push and pull I came to expect after the first Total War: Warhammer: like the Dwarfs' quest-generating Grudge Book or the Orks' literal need to always fight. I only wish it was more evident in the other races in the sequel.

Downloadable future

And that's the elephant in the room. A whole lot of DLC for the original Total War: Warhammer fundamentally changed how that game was played—about $75 worth, depending on if you pre-ordered or not (and $3 of that was literally just to activate the option to turn blood and gore on in-game).

The specter of that potential additional cost hung over a lot of my time with Total War: Warhammer 2. Every time I played the High Elves, I couldn't help but think how conventional they felt compared to the previous game's wildly different combatants. Every time I played the Skaven, I thought about how nice it would be to have two, or three, or four more species just as unique as they are to play and battle.

Which isn't to say Total War: Warhammer 2 isn't a fine strategy game on its own. The action is as endearingly exaggerated as ever. Every squad still carries that unique, RPG-like weight that makes you want to protect them—even as victory conditions force you to throw them on the pyre to progress. But the last Total War: Warhammer had all that and a less homogenous set of campaigns to put your soldiers of the Old World through. Not to mention I invested about a C-note toward fine-tuning it into the almost-perfect version of itself.

It seems all but given that Total War: Warhammer 2 will have a similarly long tail of post-release support. That's great! The content on offer already is certainly enough to get me there. And Creative Assembly's claims that the company has learned from its mistakes have me feeling optimistic. Until I actually see how vital—and how expensive—any upcoming DLC is for shaking up the game's same-y bits, however, I'll remain just a little bit nervous.

The Good:

A gorgeous rendition of the absurd Warhammer universe.

Easy to become invested in your custom armies and their abilities.

Every faction feels unique (if not quite as unique as the last game's).

The Skaven.

The Bad:

Painfully long load times.

Slightly more homogenous campaigns per faction than its predecessor.

High Elves are a bit boring compared to their fellows.

The Ugly:

Nervously holding my breath over upcoming DLC.

Verdict: Total War: Warhammer 2 shakes up the wonderful strategy of its predecessor with new factions and locales. Although the DLC X-factor could shake up the campaigns even further. Buy it.